Shop. That’s the generic name for high school courses that most people over 30 years of age perceive as classes in which the basics of working with tools are taught while students make bookends and tinker with car engines, often in out-of-the-way corners or basements of high school buildings.
Whether that perception was ever based on reality is irrelevant. Today, what’s important is that it is in the shop areas where the excitment is happening.
With the help of computers and creative teachers, young people are being taught some of the latest in today’s technologies, with classes in laser optics, desktop publishing, computer-aided manufacturing and design, as well as broadcasting and robotics, among them.
“In the 1800s, (vocational education) was called the hands and minds department, then practical arts, then industrial arts, then industrial technology and now applied technology,” said Jeff Jerdee, chairman of the applied technology division at Elgin High School. “The process has changed more in the last 15 years than during the industrial revolution.”
Throughout the northwest suburbs, businesses such as Allstate Insurance Companies, B.T.M. Industries in Woodstock and Seigle’s Home and Building Centers in Elgin are forming partnerships with educators to plan curricula so that when students graduate, they are employable.
“The public and business and industry are calling out that we’re graduating students who can’t write their names or fill out an application. (They’re saying) you’re giving us students that can’t measure and all sorts of things,” said Stan Evers, dean of occupational education at McHenry County College.
But the problem facing schools is more than teaching students the basics. The face of the work force is changing, too. In 1983, there were about 111.5 million people in the work force; in 1991, the number rose to about 125 million, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Statistics.
In 1983, there were 127,000 people employed as sheetmetal workers; in 1991, the number dropped to 121,000, according to the statistics. By contrast, there were about 31.2 million employed in technical, sales and administrative support positions in 1983. By 1991, that number had grown to more than 38 million, the statistics say.
Yet it’s not just a changing job market but the students themselves who are fueling the engine of change.
“In 1988, we were faced with declining enrollments in our industrial and vocational classes,” said Craig Kendall, teacher at Crystal Lake High School. “We got down in our metal shop to where we were having one class for one semester.”
To meet the challenges that come with these changes, some high schools are being very creative. At Wheeling High School, District 214 has built a Center for Applied Technology which, when students take a one-year program, will introduce them to 16 technologies. There are 20 technologies in all, said Linda Babl, head of practical arts technology and computer education.
The center “looks nothing like a classroom,” Babl said. “It’s like a small office complex.” The technologies available range from a full TV broadcast center where every student produces a 15-minute video, to biotechnology where students do DNA analysis, to aerodynamics complete with a flight simulator, Babl said.
Six-hundred of the school’s 1,900 students are taking vocational classes, Babl said. Also, in traditional vocational programs, only about 4 percent of the students were girls. Twenty-four percent of the students this year in the tech center are girls, she said.
“Studies show we’ve been neglecting our girls. Girls want to be scientists and engineers, too,” Babl said.
At Crystal Lake High School, the board approved $50,000 for a technology lab, Kendall said. With the board’s money plus some money from selling some expensive but little used shop equipment, Crystal Lake was able to equip 12 modules with a manufacturing focus.
“The image of industry is these guys shoveling coal, but there’s this,” Randall said as he pointed to computer-equipped work stations.
At one, two students work on a computer to design a metal part. Once the design is complete, the computer gives the information to a control center that programs the lathe, and the piece is made.
At another, a young woman works at designing a model race car with the help of a wind tunnel. “They’ll go 65 feet in nine-tenths of a second or less,” Randall said. And at yet another, students are programming an electronic wood router.
The fall pilot class was hand picked and included an equal number of girls and boys. This semester, the lab is running five sessions. “The kids are asking, `Where is Part 2?’ ” Randall said.
Crystal Lake also is devising its own curriculum and teaching methods. “Industry has told us their biggest complaint is that people can’t work together. So, we’re putting kids together . . . and telling them, `You have to work together.’ The grade will depend partly on how well they cooperate.”
There’s also a national and state initiative to add a tech prep option to college prep and general education tracks aimed at the middle 50 percent of high school students who have been called the neglected majority, said Evers of McHenry County College.
“The top 25 percent go to college. The bottom 25 percent, we’re not sure at this point what happens (to them),” he said, “but, though they’re intelligent and motivated, those in the middle end up in what’s called the general education track, which doesn’t put them into universities and it doesn’t put them into jobs.”
Though only about 25 percent graduate with a four-year college degree, that’s not necessarily bad news for today’s youth. Students “will need more than a high school diploma for the future work force, but industry is saying that the bulk of what they will need is people with a two-year education at a community college,” said Pam Block, executive director of Career Cooperative for Harper College District 512.
McHenry County College is in its second year of preparation for tech prep, and “integrating academics and technology is what we’re working on this year. … We brought together workers who work at drafting and office systems technologies and drew from them all the items they thought were necessary for a student to know to be successful in that occupation. We then took all those items … and teachers put (them) in a place where they should be taught. … It’s very business based, and that’s not a notion some educators are very comfortable with,” said Paul Meyers, director of McHenry County Cooperative for Employment Education.
Difficult or not, for some students in the Harper College district, which has the most complete and longest running tech prep program, it’s a success. Tech prep students must take all the courses necessary to qualify for college entrance as well as their technical courses.
“Last year we tested the tech prep students and 90 percent tested at college level in all academic areas. About 50 percent of the general population (entering Harper) needs remedial courses,” Block said.
